who just kind of plays by the rules.

You're kind of a nice girl from next door

who is silly and funny, but I don't think

everybody would probably know that you--

(dramatic music)

- Like so many people right now,

I've been living my life online,

been working from home, online meetings,

I talked to my friends through Google Hangouts,

and it got me thinking, how much can a private investigator

find out about you if they had 60 minutes?

If someone wanted to stalk me or I don't know,

bring me down in an expose,

how easy would it be for them to do that?

I really don't know what's out there.

There could be some pretty embarrassing stuff,

some stuff that I've definitely blacked out.

(dramatic music)

Now's the time to find out if I've got like way too much

information out there so I can hopefully fix it.

So I called Elizabeth South, private investigator

and put her on the case.

(phone rings)

- [Elizabeth] Hello?

- Hi Elizabeth. This is Sarah from Buzzfeed.

- [Elizabeth] Hi Sarah, how are you doing?

- How are you? Thank you for taking the call.

- [Elizabeth] I'm looking up background,

see what I could find on one of the staff members.

You give me the information.

- Right, and that that staff member

is actually going to be me. (laughs)

What do you need to start the search?

- [Elizabeth] Your first and last name.

- Have you ever found like a person that has a second family

or anything like that?

- [Elizabeth] Oh yeah.

- Oh, that, is that common, more common than I've been?

- [Elizabeth] Yeah, I've dated them

- Oh God.

- [Elizabeth] By accident, without knowing it.

Like three times, yeah, and I ended up dating

a lot of Wall Street guys with one or two other families,

I had no idea. Then I got into PI work, on accident.

- Oh, that was your inspiration.

- [Elizabeth] Yeah.

- [Sarah] So how much time do you need?

- [Elizabeth] Three to four hours.

We'll get quite a bit information on you.

- All right. Thank you. Take care.

- [Elizabeth] My pleasure, look forward to it.

- Bye. Bye.

(tense music)

Elizabeth says before you hire a private investigator,

you should always research them.

So I'm going to investigate her.

Okay Kay and Associates.

Okay, she's not in a flight company,

so I must have spelled it wrong.

All right, so this is where she works, Kay and Associates.

And you should see if, how long they're licensed.

Okay. So we're going to do a search here,

license type, lamp adjuster.

I didn't know that that was a thing.

Oh, will you look at that?

1992, September 16, 1992, issuance date. Okay.

- When I'm going through my research

and I'm looking up Ms. Sarah Burton,

I mean, obviously, you know, we have databases where

we get a lot of our information from,

and we cross reference that.

However, I don't think people realize how much information

you can actually get off social media.

Really everything. I know almost everything about you now.

- Elizabeth South, Google.

Which one are you? No, that can't be her.

Is that her?

I had to stop looking up things about Elizabeth

because it felt weird, but she is legit.

So now I'm legitimately scared to find out

what she finds out about me.

I guess I'll just wait.

- What was most interesting was when I had a call

with a former roommate.

I wonder if her family knows about this.

I was informed that she--

(dramatic music)

Hello? - Hi. How are you?

- Good. How are you?

- So there probably wasn't that much on me, right?

- Well, I mean, I don't know what you consider very much.

I've got a lot of info on you.

- Oh no. Okay. All right. All right.

Well, I guess we should just dive in.

- Yeah, I did find out something

that probably is not on your social media profile.

I mean, here's the thing.

- Okay.

- Most people are like you, like,

you're going to have Facebook.

You really need to make it private,

especially if you have friends

or you're going to be posting any private information,

because that really tells people where they can find you.

Most people don't realize how much information they input

into the app, that you can still be located with.

Even for you, I recommend having private accounts

and then public accounts.

Like I have a number of celebrity friends,

but they have a separate account

under a name that's not connected to them.

They do not connect your phone number to it,

I can find you like that.

- Okay.

- Connect your regular email to it.

I mean, there's, I can't give away too many secrets,

but I have conversations with my friends.

Like if anyone ever calls you, you hit me up first.

You never trust anybody.

If I would've wanted to find loads of information on you,

very easy to do.

- When you say "loads of information," what do you mean?

- I mean, not only all of your friends back to high school

who is connected to you, what you were doing,

your interests, your job history, your hobbies.

- So the stuff that is out there now, in the past,

even if I go and change privacy settings, or I delete them,

that doesn't necessarily mean it's gone from the internet.

That's what you're saying?

- That's exactly what I'm saying.

- Did you find anything bad about me?

Is there anything that you would recommend

that I take offline?

- I mean, so if you're really like, if you're one of these,

I would say conservative, religious people, they might,

they may find it sinister.

I found it super entertaining

and I decided we could be friends.

- Oh, okay.

- I found out for your birthday

that you wanted to have a seance.

And there was an exorcism part to it.

- [Sarah] Yeah, to try to exorcize my demons.

- Did it work?

- Um, I guess so, because my record's pretty clean, right?

(laughs)

As you probably know,

I don't have like an arrest record or anything.

So I feel like I don't have that much.

Is there anything else that you found

most people maybe wouldn't realize you could find so easily?

- I know I have your phone numbers,

you know, linked to you.

I have all of your past addresses.

I have you listed from March 2011 to October 2012 at (bleep)

- That's completely accurate.

- I can give you five others. (laughs)

- No, I don't need to, I, move on.

- Your, your social security is. (bleep)

This is just on a flat across the board,

what we get from our databases.

- Okay, okay.

- I can tell how you vote, how you're registered to vote.

I see all your friends, family members, their age,

their dates of birth, all of your neighbors.

Now this is going to probably freak you out a little bit.

- Um, okay?

- So not only do I see all your possible neighbors,

I can see all of your possible neighbors,

their social security, their date of birth, their age,

and all addresses associated with them,

as well as getting their phone numbers.

So if I wanted to interview literally anyone

you've ever been near, I can do it.

- Wow. Yeah, please don't call my neighbor from 2012.

Thank you.

- Well, that's too late.

Yeah. I did talk to one of your neighbors.

(dramatic music)

I have conversations with my friends.

Like if anyone ever calls you, you hit me up first.

You never trust anybody.

Really nice, they seemed very sweet,

On the surface, you look like someone who just kind of

plays by the rules, you're comedic,

you're kind of a nice girl from next door

who is silly and funny, but I don't think everybody

would probably know that you donated eggs.

Wasn't that around 2012, something like that?

- That was, I did that right after college

to pay off some of my debt,

but like very few people know that.

- Well now I do everyone who watches this video

is probably gonna know.

- I mean, it's fine, it's okay.

I, I don't feel bad about it.

It's just one of those, like things that I did in the past.

- If I would have wanted to go deeper into that

and to find what happened, it's a very good possibility

we could have gotten information.

So I'm not saying that sometime in the future, you know,

10, 15 years from now that I might not get a call

from somebody who you may end up being their birth mother.

And we can track that back.

- I selected a program where I did it anonymously.

So I thought--

- There's always a way to find that answer,

that's all I can tell you.

- I do realize with the internet,

and obviously with all these DNA testing--

- Gonna pop up.

- Yeah.

- Because you didn't think back in 2012,

that this would happen.

Like when me and my partner got together, I was like,

before we get married, we're doing an ancestry thing.

That's gonna make sure you don't have any love children

that I don't know about,

because I might not stay with you if I find that.

- What can I do now to try to make myself more secure?

- If it's a place you frequently go,

that people could just walk in there and see you

and you don't want to be found,

like this is our Sunday brunch place.

So I'm like, look, if you want to be found, fine,

but most girls I know are on dating apps,

and most dating apps, actually all dating apps

have a lot of creeps on them.

If you are on a dating profile,

do not use pictures that you put on your other

social media profiles, 'cause they'll find you.

- 'Cause they'll match them up.

- What I recommend to absolutely everybody,

you don't autofill credit cards.

Never put that computer on a public wifi.

- [Sarah] Okay.

- Even if you're at Starbucks, you open up your computer

and it's going to automatically connect,

and you do have professional hackers to where they will

hang out near coffee shops or places where there's free wifi

and it's real easy to get on your wifi

and go through all of your information.

- So do I need to have a discussion

with my friends about answering phone calls?

- Yes, absolutely.

- Okay. Alright. Thank you.

- Thank you, Sarah, goodbye.

Stay safe, see you later.

- Okay bye.

- Bye.

(dramatic music)

- So what did I learn? Pretty clean online record,